The platform is designed for the Smartphone cameras and uses computer vision to detect their relative position around the world without using GPS. This helps developers create experiences like 3D mapping, indoor navigation, and immersive gaming.

What Led to Tango’s Closure?

Tango’s biggest obstacle to success was its requirements. For you to enjoy the platform, you needed a specialized, hi-tech camera phone, e.g a camera that is compatible with the platform. But the platform now has a successor in the name of “ARCore.”

ARCore is the new Software Development Kit (SDK) that brings the AR experience closer to Android users. The technology accomplishes more, just like its predecessor, but works on a broader range of Smartphones.

“We are turning down support for Tango on 1st March 2018. Thank you to our incredible community of developers who made such progress with Tango over the last three years. We will continue working with you on ARCore,” the Google Tango team tweeted.

“Google is continuing AR development with ARCore. This is a new platform designed for building augmented reality apps for a broad range of devices without the requirements for specialized hardware,” the Company added.

The new AR platform does not need a special camera to perform. It already has support on high-end Android phones like Google Pixel 2 and Samsung S8 which runs on Android 7.0 Nougat and above. Google is working with other major Smartphone companies like Huawei, LG, ASUS, among others for quality and performance checks.

Google wrote in a blog saying, “Whereas Tango required a special hardware; ARCore is a fast Android-Scale SDK that enables high quality augmented reality across millions of qualified mobile devices.”